Former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden is dedicating his time to teaching everyday people about technologies that allow for anonymous communication and message encryption.

According to Reuters, Snowden recently spoke to attendees at the New York City conference called Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) -- via video, of course, since he's still in Moscow -- about technologies that can protect citizens from government snooping.

"You in this room, right now have both the means and the capability to improve the future by encoding our rights into programs and protocols by which we rely every day," said Snowden.

"That is what a lot of my future work is going to be involved in."

One of the technologies included a system called SecureDrop, which allows people to anonymously leak documents to journalists.

This hits home for Snowden, since he blew the cover on the NSA's surveillance programs early last year. These programs consisted of bulk data collection from sources like phone records, where the government took on a "collect now, filter later" approach. The agency has said that the bulk data collection was meant to identify terrorist threats, but it's been discovered that the data of Americans has been collected without any clear evidence of terrorist links.

It was later revealed that Snowden conned between 20 to 25 NSA employees to give him their login credentials and passwords while working at the NSA regional operations center for a month in Hawaii. Snowden reportedly told the NSA employees that he needed their passwords in order to do his job, and after downloading secret NSA documents, he leaked the information to the media.

After the leaks, Snowden ended up in Moscow, Russia. He requested to extend his Russian visa earlier this month, since it expires at the end of July. But the U.S. wants Russia to send him home to face criminal charges for the NSA leaks.